How title tags in SEO help you to gain high rankings?
HIGH SEO RANKINGS WITH TITLE TAGS
Nowadays when we go online, we can see an endless stream of web contents with a huge incursion of websites. Also not only that, these websites are constantly struggling for attention from search engines and visitors alike. For this reason, there is an SEO process, which controls ranking and the title tag is what people see first. Here, we will discuss how it affects your site’s ranking in the search engines or not. However, first let us see what exactly a title tag is?
WHAT ARE TITLE TAGS?
Title Tags are basically HTML elements. That gives information about web pages to the search engines as well as visitors to the websites. They are also known as SEO title or meta title or page title. They belong to the <head> section of the source code of the web page, specify the title of the pages, and are most recognisable as the blue clickable link on the SERPs (search engine result pages).
A title tag is meant to provide a clear and complete idea about the contents of the web pages. Especially to the search engines and visitors. While sharing content on other websites and social media, SEO titles appear in the form of anchor texts.
TITLE TAGS ARE IMPORTANT TO SEO
You may ask do title tags play a major role in SEO ranking like before and if so how? Well, as you see, title tags are no longer the panacea. As precise keyword stuffing does not work anymore for Google. However, in spite of their weakening association, well-written and optimized titles and higher rankings still concord with each other. For the past few years, user behaviour factors have held a very significant role in ranking procedures.
Having said that, the title of a page is still the first thing what people see in SERPs. This is because we still try to judge a book by its covers. A searcher will look at the title tag and decide if the page is likely to answer for their problems or not. This is why a well-written title is always admirable as it can increase the number of clicks and traffic; thereby have some impact on the rankings.
However, Google no longer requires title tags to include exact match keywords in them to understand the contents of the page any longer. A simple example can show for that: type in “How to increase your presentation skills” on Google. You will see that two results (positions 3 and 5) in the top 10 results have exact match phrases.
This shows how search engines do not rely on keyword instances only; rather they are getting more and more powerful in reading and understanding the context and content of the web pages.
As I said earlier that the cover of a book still matters with people, thus there are few things you can do to improve SEO titles:
- Come up with a unique title for your page; one that is concise and accurate about the content of the page.
- Keep the title 50-60 characters long so that they are not abridged in the SERPs.
- Put important keywords first, but keep them simply because you are writing them for visitors and not search engines.
- If you have a brand keep that name in the titles.
FEW WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TITLE TAGS
Here we will look at some SEO techniques that you can follow to improve your title tags and thereby improve your webpage rankings. Keep in mind that each of your web pages (if you have more than one) must have a different title.
- Make sure that you have unique and high-quality content on your web page. Search engine algorithms tend to rank pages with good quality content higher. If you have spammy content on both your title tag and content then you may run the risk of being ranked-down by Google’s Panda algorithm as it checks on-site content quality.
- Keep in mind that search engine algorithms prioritise title tags from left to right; meaning the most important keywords should be on the left, i.e., in the beginning of the tag. In case there are too many characters in your title, search engines may penalise you by truncating your title, but even so, the important words will be protected. If you have the focused keywords at the start of your title, Google algorithms can understand the content of your page better and as such you will have a higher ranking for your web pages.
- At present, Google allows only upto the first 70 characters of your title whereas; Bing shows have upto 65 characters before trimming your title tag. Therefore, the ideal length of your title tag must be between 60-65 characters. Also, avoid an “ALL CAP” title tag as it might restrict the number of characters you can include by taking up more space than in case of lower-case letters or characters.
- You can optimize your SEO title by incorporating the focus keyword(s) from your content. You can also adopt this practise: have no more than two keywords in each of your title tags; one of them being the focus keyword. Furthermore, you can make your title tag look like a phrase by adding long-tail keywords in them.
- As I have repeatedly said that having focus keywords in the title tag is always important as they play a major role as an on-page SEO factor. However, do not overdo yourself and stuff your title tags with excessive keywords, as Google algorithms can sometimes consider your tags as spam in such cases.
- Limit the use of stop words in your titles as they have no value as a keyword and can run the risk of search engine algorithms viewing your title as spams. Stop words generally consists of articles (a/an & the, etc.), prepositions (on, it, etc.), pronouns (me, he/she, etc.), conjunctions (and, or, but, etc.) and other parts of speeches.
- If you go through various search results on the first pages of the different search engines like, Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. you will find that the first few title tags always have numerals in them. Thus, the next time you make a content with a list, make sure to include a numeral (like “8 tips…” or “5 ways…” etc.) in your title tag.
As the saying goes “practise makes a man perfect”; rightly so in this case as well, keep practising with the above tips and tricks after your first writing until you can perfect yourself.
If you are looking to get the most of your on-page strategy, never neglect the small tweaks that add upto the big picture: better and higher SEO rankings. Even so, some titles are always a must-have as they account for the nomenclature of your page; whereas others even though they are not vital can sometimes take you one-step ahead of your competitors. Small changes in improving user experience and help search engines understand the content better is always appreciated in the long run.
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